London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

One doesn’t have to be a fly on the wall at muppet-traducing, vampire-squid-sucking Goldman Sachs to know that bosses at the bank aren’t going to like Greg Smith’s new book, Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story.

The former London-based head of Goldman Sachs’ United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa wrote an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times in March. In it he claimed that the bank had a corrupt corporate culture, and he said it made him ill how “callously” employees treated clients — oh, and they called these valued customers “muppets”, he famously added.

So now Smith’s book is coming out. Cue publishing brouhaha, $1.5 million advance, etc. The first chapter has been released and although the claims aren’t yet scandalous — interns forced to cart their chairs around because there weren’t enough in a bid to foster competitiveness; wrong lunch orders triggering cheddar salad flung back in interns’ faces — they’re not the sort of things Goldman HQ will like.

Funny, then, that anyone trying to buy the book from Amazon is greeted with the message: “Customers viewing this page may be interested in these sponsored links: www.goldmansachs.com — visit our official website for news and information about Goldman Sachs.”

Wonder if the vampire squids are paying for that.

Gloves are off in the austerity debate

Today programme presenter Evan Davis chaired a feisty austerity debate at the Houses of Parliament, organised by Lord Layard of the London School of Economics, with experts clashing over whether the Government is cutting “too far and too fast”.

In the red corner was Nobel prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In the blue corner, HSBC’s economic guru Stephen King. When the two clashed on a point of fact over Japanese saving rates, Krugman said “we’ll settle this outside”. Now that’s a “debate” we’d pay money to see.

Krugman predictably labelled austerity “mad”. King, a stylish debater, opened the pro-austerity case with the following: “You may have read on Professor Krugman’s blog that I would be arguing alongside Deborah Falcus. She is in fact my PA and hence probably unlikely to be up to arguing the motion, and in any case she’s on holiday.”

Among the political heavy-hitters present was former City minister Lord Myners who pointedly asked Krugman to offer his views on the performance of Chancellor George Osborne in a late intervention. The look on Evan Davis’s face was positively pained.

* Another patriotic act from Scottish first minister Alex Salmond? Scottish Power’s announcement of an eye-watering 7% increase in its energy tariffs came at almost exactly the moment that Salmond was on stage answering questions over the country’s independence referendum…

* David Murray-Hundley — a veteran tech entrepreneur who launched IT solutions company Adaro Red — worked through the first dot-com bubble and says that a lot of companies which are now starting up are repeating the fatal mistake which was made last time round of overestimating their firm’s value.

He says a start-up business recently rang him while he was walking his dogs and asked his advice. They said they thought they were worth £2 million but what did he think?

He did a quick calculation and said they had to go back to the drawing board, as they weren’t worth more than £250,000. And then he went back to walking his dogs.